The first transatlantic flight 100 years ago
By Olivier THIBAULT
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Paris, June 13, 2019 (AFP) - When two British pilots steered a biplane
across the vast Atlantic 100 years ago, battling frozen sleet and thick fog
for more than 16 hours, they were making aviation history.
With their harrowing 3,000-kilometre (1,860-mile) crossing, Captain John
Alcock and navigator Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown completed the world's
first non-stop transatlantic flight.
Here is a look back at their groundbreaking journey between Newfoundland in
Canada and Ireland on June 14-15, 1919.
- Daily Mail cash prize -
The North Atlantic had already been conquered by air when Alcock and Brown
climbed into their modified World War I bomber on June 14 -- but never in one
go.
Just weeks earlier three US Navy Curtiss flying boats had set out from New
York state to make the trip with stopovers in Newfoundland, the Azores,
Portugal and England.
Only one completed the journey, covering 6,000 kilometres in three weeks.
Britain's Daily Mail newspaper had laid down the challenge for a non-stop
crossing by offering 10,000 pounds for a single flight from North America to
the British Isles in under three days.
Just weeks ahead of the Alcock-Brown bid, two other teams had made an
attempt: the first plane ditched into the ocean and was rescued; the second
crashed on takeoff.
- Barely clears the trees -
Alcock, aged 26, and Brown, 32, took off in the early afternoon from St
John's, one of the easternmost points of North America.
Their Vickers Vimy biplane was weighed down by 4,000 litres (1,056 gallons)
of fuel and only just able to clear the trees, lurching in gusts of wind.
"Several times I held my breath, from fear that our undercarriage would hit
a roof or a tree-top," Brown recalled in "Flying the Atlantic in Sixteen
Hours" (1920).
Once airborne, the Royal Air Force aviators turned eastwards for Ireland,
heading into the night.
- Flying blind -
Heavy fog meant they flew blind for much of the trip, unable to get their
bearings.
The plane was tossed about by the wind, rising and plunging, at times just
metres (feet) above the water, Alcock recounted afterwards.
"I believe we looped the loop and by accident we did a deep spiral. It was
very alarming. We had no sense of the horizon," Alcock told the Daily Mail.
Ice and hail jammed some of the instruments and threatened to freeze the
motors. Brown had to chip off ice with a knife.
"We had a terrible trip. We never saw a boat, and we got no wireless
messages at all," Alcock said afterwards.
"We flew along the water and we had doubts as to our position, although we
believed we were 'there or thereabouts'. We looked out for land expecting to
find it any time."
- Irish bog landing -
When solid ground did suddenly appear in the morning of June 15, "it was
great", the pilot said.
He spotted what seemed a good field for a landing near Clifden in County
Galway but it turned out to be a bog.
"The wheels sank axle deep in the field. The Vimy toppled over on her
nose," he said.
The plane was damaged but the two pioneers emerged unscathed. The trip had
taken just over 16 hours.
- Heroes -
Alcock and Brown were welcomed as heroes in Dublin and London, handed the
Daily Mail prize by Winston Churchill, then aviation minister, and later
knighted by King George V.
Their record would however be overshadowed just eight years later when on
May 20, 1927, American Charles Lindbergh made a transatlantic flight alone and
between two major cities, from New York to Paris.
Alcock would die just six months after his feat, when his plane crashed
near Rouen, France. Brown passed away in 1948.
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